The aged mule story is charming; we can scarcely hear it too often, but somehow it is oddly familiar; have we not heard it before in slightly different form? Yes; surely it is the story Plutarch[338] tells when he is recounting the kindness of Cato to his beasts. ‘A good man will take care of his horses and dogs, not only while they are young, but when they are old and past service. Thus the people of Athens, when they were building the Hecatompedon set at liberty those mules which they thought had worked hardest and let them go free, and one of them, it is said, afterwards came of her own accord back to the works and trotted by the side of the beasts who were drawing the waggons and led them on and seemed to be exhorting and encouraging them. And the people passed a vote that she should be entertained at the public expense to the day of her death.’ The same story is told by Aelian[339] of the time ‘when the Athenians were building the Parthenon,’ and he quotes as his authority Aristotle. It is Aristotle[340] who has set the whole uncertainty going. He tells the story of the time ‘when at Athens they were building the temple.’
By the ‘temple’ Aelian and Plutarch are almost certainly right in understanding the Parthenon. If they are right, we can infer that Tarantinos, an author whose date is unknown, and whom we have no ground for regarding as an authority on Athenian topography, has made at any rate one mistake, when he identifies ‘the temple’ with the great temple of his own day, the temple ‘of Zeus.’ Tarantinos is, presumably, taking the story from Aristotle. If so, it is clear that, besides wrongly identifying ‘the temple,’ he supposed that the Enneakrounos, which on this hypothesis he for the first time imports into the story, was identical with the Kallirrhoë of the Ilissos[341]. But what is the value of his evidence? His supporters may fairly be challenged to produce the credentials of a witness whose only title to be regarded as an authority is an identification almost certainly wrong. There is nothing to rebut the simple supposition that, like the author of the Etymologicum Magnum, he is merely confusing the two Kallirrhoës[342].
Finally, supposing for a moment that the passage of Thucydides leaves us in doubt as to the site of the Enneakrounos, naturally our next step would be to ask what does our next best authority, Pausanias, say? Pausanias is a topographer by profession, surely we shall learn from him where he saw the well-house. Pausanias[343] after seeing the statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton ‘not far from’ the temple of Ares, passes straight on to a small group of monuments which he links together more or less clearly; they are the Odeion; near to it the Enneakrounos; above or beyond this the temples of Demeter and Kore; a little further on the temple of Eukleia. It is quite true that he links the Odeion by no connecting particle, but that is his frequent practice when passing straight from one monument to another.
The uninstructed reader in his simplicity would naturally think that, as Pausanias passes straight from the statues of the Tyrant Slayers to the Odeion, the two lay somewhere not far apart, and so they did. The Odeion in the days of Pausanias would almost certainly be near the site of the ancient orchestra, where still are faint remains of a semi-circular building ([Fig. 46]). Anyhow it stood close to the Areopagos. But this is too simple and natural. Pausanias we are told, here and nowhere else, abruptly breaks his narrative of the buildings in the Kerameikos, and with no apparent reason and no hint in the text, flies off for nearly half-a-mile and plants his reader on the banks of the Ilissus,—a district, be it noted, that he later describes in detail,—whence he shortly returns again without warning and finishes his account of the Kerameikos. In a word we are presented with what is known as the ‘Enneakrounos Episode.’ Various causes are suggested for the ‘Episode’; the leaves of the MS. got mixed, or Pausanias was staying with friends near the Ilissus, and went home to lunch. The real cause of the ‘Episode’ is that Thucydides has been misunderstood, and that the late compiler of the Etymologicum Magnum has blundered. Pausanias[344] saw the Odeion in the neighbourhood of the old orchestra at the south-west of the Areopagos, the Enneakrounos near to it by the Pnyx rock, the temples of Demeter and Kore ‘above it’ on the Pnyx rock where were the Thesmophorion[345] and the temple of Eukleia ‘not far off’; his course of sight-seeing was here as elsewhere orderly and undisturbed.
Pausanias is seen to be at one with Thucydides and, thanks to Prof. Dörpfeld, the evidence of both has been confirmed by excavation; the sources of error and confusion in late authors, lexicographers and modern archaeologists have come to light. Surely now at last the ‘Enneakrounos Episode’ may be laid to sleep in peace.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Herod. VII. 140.
[2] Thucyd. II. 14 χαλεπῶς δὲ αὐτοῖς, διὰ τὸ ἀεὶ εἰωθέναι τοὺς πολλοὺς ἐν τοῖς ἀγροῖς διαιτᾶσθαι, ἡ ἀνάστασις ἐγίγνετο.
[3] Thucyd. I. 5, 10.